Last month, the Philadelphia Film Festival sent some of its best to Park City for the Sundance Film Festival. Here is what Managing Director Parinda Patel had to say:

Earlier this month marked the end of the annual Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Running from Thursday, January 22 – February 1, the event has set the tone for the much anticipated line up of 2015 films. One of the most buzzworthy films to keep on your radar is Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, wrapping up the festival with both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for U.S. dramatic film. If you’re keeping up with this year’s Oscar race, you’ll understand why this film has significance. In 2014, Whiplash walked away a winner in the same categories and has now moved on to become a dark horse nominee for Best Picture.

The rest of the slate was pretty impressive as well, whether they made the awards short list or not. A few notables that I saw included the bawdy, romcom Sleeping With Other People, starring Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie, and The End of the Tour, based off of Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky’s brief encounter with the late novelist David Foster Wallace while on a publicity tour for his book Infinite Jest – a breakthrough role for Jason Segel as Wallace.

There’s plenty to look forward to this year, both at the PFS Roxy Theater and of course, the Philadelphia Film Festival this fall. It will be interesting to see what carries over to the upcoming Tribeca and South by Southwest Film Festival so please stay tuned for more and watch the year in film unfold with us!

As a chaser to Richard Linklater’s monumental Boyhood, take a peek at this Sundance award-winning documentary profiling three destitute white kids from rural Missouri. Their level of poverty and all-around impoverishment makes Linklater’s screen kid look like he’s part of the Trump family.

Three distinctively different kids emerge. One is all-get-out upbeat, another, mostly dour misanthropic; the third, an interesting mess of charismatic, vain, and simpleminded. They hook you.

Like Seinfeld, Boyhood is about nothing in particular. Yet its staggering charm is that it manages to be about the things that matter most. The Richard Linklater film accomplishes no small miracle in reflecting a slice of life that, as it stretches over 12 years, boasts an authentic take on existence itself. It is unique in that it plays with time and growth in a way that forces the viewer to get immersed in its series of singular moments of the present.

Selma builds its way toward a celebration of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Sharply focused on the key months leading up to a series of three nonviolent protest marches in Selma, Alabama, it agonizingly captures the textures of human toil and determination that led to the momentous legislation. Director Ava DuVernay zeros in on Martin Luther King’s ability to channel enormous power, yet exercise exceptional self-containment and control. The film is at its strongest when it portrays the intimate, inward side of King and his entourage of key advisers and assistants. Anything but an icon, the King depicted here is very much a walking and talking human being. His worries and sorrows are portrayed side by side with his contagious confidence. We see King at a low ebb–calling Mahalia Jackson in the middle of the night and asking her to sing to him. We see King whispering his despair to Ralph Abernathy as they sit in a darkened jail cell, the latter providing succor to his friend by quoting the Bible.

I could not be more relieved and galvanized by the films I’ve seen been watching lately. Whiplash and Birdman were both incredibly immersing and soul-stirring movies. On a basic level, they perform the way film is supposed to, reflecting universal aspects of human spirit with such authenticity and intensity that you have no choice, but to feel connected to the characters. Their vulnerabilities, their idiosyncrasies, the way, ultimately, like us all, they just want to be loved.

Wes Anderson prefers not to enter himself into a particular time and place unless he’s able to twist and turn his subject until it’s ready to fit into HIS world. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, his eighth and best feature, his enchanting stylization rises to a level of obsessiveness that bodes well for the adventurous filmgoer. Anderson pulls all the stops in production values in taking on the vanished elegance of Old World Europe between the World Wars. His stock company, now enlarged by an even wider swath of familiar actors (no fewer than 17 this time) is here bolstered by a zany, bravura performance by Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes plays Gustave H., a genteel and dapper yet manic and profane hotel concierge who has a way with words and with ladies of a certain advanced age. He controls the Grand Budapest Hotel with a courtly whip.

Rife with colorful characters and brimming with the signature rhyming banter of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Into The Woods is the closest thing this Christmas season to a rewarding family film. Just don’t expect things to come with a ribbon wrapped around them. If the mashing of familiar Grimm fairy tales into a not-so-conventional tale sounds like your idea of good fun, you wouldn’t be far wrong. Although the Rob Marshall adaptation of the 1987 stage production loses some steam in its second half, it is a well-cast showcase for the likes of Meryl Streep, Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, Johnny Depp (as the Big Bad Wolf), and especially the amusing Tracy Ullmann and the excellent Emily Blunt.

It’s as dramatic as when you first lay eyes on Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull. In Foxcatcher, Steve Carell is not at all the Steve Carell with whom we’ve become accustomed. There’s not a sliver of the character from The Office or The 40 Year Old Virgin to be found. Nor does Carell, fitted with a prosthetic nose, smile once in the film. In one of the year’s very best performances, a super serious Carell gives an uncanny, haunting take on John Eleuthere DuPont.

Director and screenwriter Mike Binder will be called on the carpet by the gripe-happy protectors of the politically correct. He’ll be accused of tripping over stereotypes as he presents the story of a custody battle over a racially mixed seven-year-old, Eloise. Despite being a little obvious around the edges, Black or White essentially presents a modern day racial drama with solid conviction and fresh ideas.

Raised by her maternal grandparents after her mother died in childbirth, Eloise (Jillian Estell) faces another tragedy when her grandmother dies in a car accident just before the film begins. Her grandfather, Eliot (a riveting Kevin Costner), a corporate lawyer, suddenly faces the task of raising the child by himself. Just when he begins to get his footing, Eloise’s fraternal grandmother, Rowena (Octavia Spencer, very good) decides the girl would be better off in her custody–especially since her long-estranged, miscreant son, Reggie (Andre Holland), is suddenly eager to get involved with his daughter Or is he?